This paper emphasizes the aporetic nature of the Salamanca Statement on Special Needs Education (UNESCO, 1994), adopting a cross-cultural perspective. It draws on an intersectional perspective on inclusion (Connor, Ferri & Annamma, 2016; Artiles & Kozleski, 2016; Erevelles, 2014) to argue that although inclusion has been defined by such an international declaration as a transformative project to ensure access to quality education for all students, national inclusive policies are still focused on a pathological construction of student difference, slowly incorporating children from different linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. The focus on Italy and the United States is a response to examine the discourses and practices of inclusion in two countries that have been impacted by the Salamanca Statement thinking. To substantiate our argument concerned with the limitations embedded in the Salamanca Statement, data from two empirical studies conducted in Rome and in Upstate New York will be presented. The studies show how inclusion leads to overrepresentation of migrant students in Special Educational Needs. We conclude that the Salamanca Statement has been transferred into a tool to strengthen normality against difference, and that it should focus on interrupting micro-exclusions for groups sitting at the intersections of race, ability and other identity markers.

The authors present a qualitative study which investigates the intersections between English Language Learner (ELL) status, disability, and special education in a mid-sized urban school district in Upstate New York. They explore how teachers conceptualize and implement New York State Education Department policies which affect the inclusive education of ELL students. The authors discuss how the discourse used in these policies, along with teachers' limited access to guidance and support, could lead to the exacerbation of educational inequities and exclusion of ELLs, despite the promise to support inclusion and success for all students. The Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) framework is used as an intersectional tool to help re-frame existing inclusive policies and practices.

This paper explores the ways in which white monolingual and monocultural English teachers articulate racial issues and conceptualise the racial identities of multiply-marginalised students in the classroom context. Drawing on the work of Charles Mills (2003), this contribution aligns with an understanding of white supremacy as a means to historically dispossess, assimilate, and eliminate negatively racialized and language-minoritized communities, through mechanisms of Western settler-colonial hegemony and English language teaching. The authors present a qualitative case study of discursive practices of white English language educators who, despite their intentions to be inclusive, often (re)produce white supremacist values, language, and knowledges. Finally, this paper supports a more critical approach to the field of English language teaching, which recognizes and contends with whiteness and white supremacy in the co-construction of negatively-racialized and language-minoritized identities.

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